SoundsOnline Ships Vocaloid Avanna, The Robo Enya

If you check out the demos on their site, ‘Celtic-inspired’ translates roughly into ‘robo-Enya’.

Yamaha’s Vocaloid technology is designed to let you create virtual vocals by entering lyrics and notes. At this point, the voice synthesis technology is realistic enough to take you into ‘uncanny valley’ territory, sounding realistic-esque.

The new Vocaloid 3 interface lets you import wav files, so Avanna can “sing along” with your compositions from within Vocaloid. Avanna comes with a default reverb for added realism; you can also add vibrato and expression to “her” voice.

Here’s a video intro to Avanna:

VOCALOID3 EDITOR Lite is included with Avanna and offers the following features:

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18 thoughts on “SoundsOnline Ships Vocaloid Avanna, The Robo Enya”

Mixed reaction here. I’ve heard better implementations, sonically. But this does seem to be all artificial, so it might have more flexibility. Seems a little tedious on the programming end of it– i.e. typing in each word into each note. Though it may have some incredibly sophisticated things going on under the hood, the price seems a little high. If it is not too high, I think they need a better demo to show more of what it can do. That demo is showing me $39 software.

Eh…just record yourself and use Auto tune or Celemony to make it sound different. Or make friends with a singer. This looks useful for videogame composers, but seem stoo tedious for regular music unless you’re planning to abuse the technology in some fashion.

I’m on a Mac. I feel sure my world won’t crumble because I can’t pretend to channel Enya or sound like an anime girl with a frog in her bra. Its a clever effect, but like obvious auto-tuning, its too freeze-dried for me.

Way too enforced to my liking. It seems to me as if they’re forcefully trying to make a product work for a market it wasn’t designed for.

Now, I don’t speak nor understand fluent Japanese but I know my way around, I can manage to grasp certain basics. And if you look into the Japanese vocal banks you’ll notice that it sounds much more realistic and as such also a lot better. For example, check out the Kaito vocal bank here:

But when listening to Avanna this doesn’t sound as natural at all. I get the impression that the voice bank is way too focused on certain vowels, thus making it almost sound like English with a Japanese accent.

All of the vocaloid voices sound better in Japanese. Japanese is a syllabic language – that is, there are a finite number of syllables which can be arranged to form words – whereas English is much more complex, with longer vowels, diphthongs, and triphthongs.